The same dignity of immemorial association hangs, it is true,
about such masculine labours as are connected with the tilling of
the earth and the sailing of the sea. Certain ancient and eternally
necessary handicrafts, such as cannot be superseded by machinery,
take their place with these. But since man's particular power of
separating himself from Nature and dominating Nature by means
of logical reason, physical science and mechanical devices, puts
him in the position of continuity breaking up those usages of the
ages upon which the ritualistic element in life depends, he has
come, by inevitable evolution, to be much more the child of the
new and the arbitrary than woman is; and in his divorce from
immemorial necessity has lost much of that symbolic distinction
which the life of woman retains.
It may thus be said that while the determining will in the soul of
the average woman ought to be directed towards that exceptional
creative energy which lifts the soul out of the flux of Nature and
gives it a glimpse of the vision of the immortals, the determining
will in the soul of the average man ought to be directed towards
the heightening of his ordinary consciousness so as to bring this up
to the level of the flux of nature and to penetrate it with the
memory of the creative moments which he has had.
In both cases the material with which the will has to work is the
emotions of love and of malice; but in the case of man this malice
tends to destroy the poetry of common life, while in the case of
woman it tends to obstruct and embarrass her soul when the magic
of the apex-thought stirs within her and an opportunity arises for
that creative act which puts the complex vision in touch with the
vision of the Gods.
The philosophy of the complex vision does not discover in its
examination of the psycho-material organism of the soul any
differentiated "faculties" which can be paralleled by the
differentiated "members" of the human body. The organic unity of
the soul is retained, in undissipated concentration, throughout
whatever movement or action or stress of energy it is led to make.
The totality of the soul becomes will, or the totality of the soul
becomes reason, or the totality of the soul becomes intuition, in
the same way as a falling body of water, or the projected stream of
a fountain _becomes_ whatever dominant colour of sky or air or
atmosphere penetrates it and transforms it. What we have called
emotion, made up of the duality of love and malice, is something
much more integral than this. For the totality of the soul, which
_becomes_ reason, consciousness, intuition, conscience, and the
like, is always composed of the very stuff and matter of emotion.
When we say "the totality of the soul becomes imagination or
intuition" it is the same thing as though we said "the emotion of
the soul becomes imagination or intuition."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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